The oil refining activity is certainly one of the most complex activities in the chemical industry. The complexity arises mainly from the nonlinear nature of the refining processes and the several possible configurations of these processes. In addition, these nonlinear terms are responsible for ruining convexity properties of the problem, thus, removing any guarantee concerning global optimality of the solutions. In this sense, one alternative to circumvent this drawback is to use convexification techniques, which render convex approximations of the original problem. The present work proposes the use McCormick envelopes to generate a convex approximation for the refinery operational planning problem. Numerical results obtained show that the proposed approach can ensure a good solution for the problem in study, even for cases where there was no solution available employing traditional methods.
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